Nobel Laureate Bertozzi to present Knobil Lecture
The McGovern Medical School Office of Research Affairs welcomes Carolyn Bertozzi, PhD, 2022 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, as the 2025 speaker for the annual Ernst Knobil Distinguished Lecture, March 4.
Bertozzi will present on “Therapeutic opportunities in glyoscience,” at 10:50 a.m., as part of the annual McGovern Medical School Research Retreat.
Bertozzi is the Baker Family Director of Stanford Chemistry, Engineering, and Medicine for Human Health, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences; and professor of Chemical and Systems Biology and of Radiology at Stanford University.
Bertozzi’s research interests span the disciplines of chemistry and biology with an emphasis on studies of cell surface sugars important to human health and disease. Her research group profiles changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer, inflammation and bacterial infection, and uses this information to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, most recently in the are of immuno-oncology.
She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999 and has received many awards for her dedication to chemistry, and to training a new generation of scientists fluent in both chemistry and biology. She has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bertozzi has won the Lamelson-MIT Prize, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, and the Chemistry of the Future Solvay Prize.
Bertozzi completed her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Harvard University and her PhD at UC Berkely, focusing on the chemical synthesis of oligosaccharide analogs. During postdoctoral work at UC San Francisco, she studied the activity of endothelial oligosaccharides in promoting cell adhesion at sites of inflammation.
The Ernst Knobil Distinguished Lecture was established in 2001 to honor Dr. Ernst Knobil, who served as the third dean of McGovern Medical School from 1981-84, and was one of the world’s leading neuroendocrinologists whose work has provided the basis for the understanding of reproductive function in women.
His work, spanning five decades, localized the pulse generator in the hypothalamus controlling the neuropeptide gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GNRH) that serves as the basis for the understanding of the 28-day ovulatory menstrual cycle. This led to the successful treatment of women suffering with infertility of hypothalamic origin with over 90 percent success rate in achieving pregnancy.
For more information about Knobil and the lecture series, visit the event’s website.